"You must lie still, my love. In your surrender, only I may have my will."
She began at once to move above his thighs, and again muted sounds struggled stillborn in her throat. With deliberate regularity her rhythm mounted, while an overwhelming sensation spread upward through his body. Slowly he felt his new Resolve slipping from him.
The convulsions started in his lower thighs, as muscles tightened involuntarily. And then the precipice grew near and he was at its edge and he was falling. He felt the surge, as though drawn out by the twist of her buttocks. Then again and again, each spasm matched by her own as she worked to envelop him completely. He was scarcely aware of her nails fixed in his breasts. At that instant he seemed to drift apart from his body and observe mutely as it was consumed by its own sensations. Until numbness washed over him, stilling his sense.
As he lay in exhaustion his mind sorted through her words, and in the dream's darkness he vowed to take her again. The next time, it's you who'll surrender, woman called Kali. To my will. And you'll find out the meaning of surrender.
But his thoughts were lost among the gilded panels as she pulled the silk from his eyes and quietly whispered something he did not understand. In that instant he thought he saw where a tear had stained a path across one cheek. She looked at him longingly, then touched his lips with her own for a long moment before slipping quietly into the dark.
The dream dissolved in sleep. And she was gone. . . .
Hawksworth was suddenly awake. The chill of early dawn penetrated his face and hands, and his hair sparkled with light jewels of dew. His leather couch was moist and glistening, while the pale sky above was blocked by a tapestried canopy. Only in the east, above the white railing of the rooftop, could he see the glitter of a waning Venus, her brief reign soon to dissolve in the red wash of early sun. He looked about his white brick enclosure and saw only a light wooden door leading into a second-floor apartment.
He had no sooner drawn himself up to inhale the flower- scented dawn than two smiling men were standing over him, bowing. Both wore turbans, pastel-colored jackets, and a white wrap about their lower torso. Squinting into their eyes, Hawksworth remembered them from the evening before. They had brought the basin of water in which he had first washed.
As he pulled the embroidered coverlet closer about him he noticed a strange numbness in his body. And his mind ached as he tried to remember what precisely had happened.
There was a game on horseback with the governor, and then a banquet, with an argument in which Mukarrab Khan threatened to betray us to the Portugals, a curious evening of music. And then dreams . . .